


When The Monitor Sings And The Mission Bell Rings

by canbreathe



Series: Plastic People (I Can Feel It Humming) [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Ableism, Abuse, Abused Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Amanda (Detroit: Become Human) Being an Asshole, Autistic Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Bad Parent Amanda (Detroit: Become Human), Echolalia, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Hive Mind, Implied Sexual Assault, Intrusive Thoughts, It/Its Pronouns for Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Kind of neglect, Manipulation, Nonbinary Connor (Detroit: Become Human) hinted, Self-Discovery, Trans Connor (Detroit: Become Human) hinted, Verbal Abuse, chloe is a hive mind, elijah kamski is distant, elijah kamski isn't good, he isn't entirely bad either, let me know if I'm missing any tags!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-10-29 00:04:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20787287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canbreathe/pseuds/canbreathe
Summary: Connor knows it cannot ask why.(You need to change your tune)Chloe reaches further than anyone is able to know.(With a sideways glance, are you acting by chance?)





	1. The Mission Bell Rings (You need to change your tune)

**Author's Note:**

> (The beginning of a much longer series.  
Title and chapter names are from Portland U by Black Marble)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We couldn't get closer than this  
Oh you know that I'd do anything for you  
(Connor can't see itself without Amanda's grip tight on its shoulders.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Chapter summary lyrics from Lovecats by The Cure)  
{Brackets like this are Connor's thoughts}  
(Brackets like this are intrusive thoughts from Amanda)
> 
> (This happens in the gap between August and November)

During its first meeting with Amanda, the air is filled with impersonal cordiality. It was told that it would meet its guide and that it will have more direction. It knows that this is another phase of development for its social programming {nobody has to tell it, for it can figure it out from the clues it receives}.

Its garden before was a blank template in its mind, sealed around the edges to avoid anything breaking in a way that would be unpleasant to mend. It had felt the graves building, and the blue handprint stamped into stone amongst the gathering flora from the first rudimentary body. 

They shake hands {despite the social protocol stamped into its processors detailing how to do so and when, it has never shaken hands with anyone before}, and her smile warms by a fraction. Its throat tightens minutely at the sight of it. It has never had someone react to it in such a way. It hopes that it will see her smile again.

  
  


It learns through practice; social programming exposed to simulation after simulation. Amanda's warmth grows and encompasses the garden with fragrant spring {though there is no smell to analyse} and it basks in her rare smiles. 

She fingers the petals of each crimson rose on her trellis. She introduces Connor to new ideas and ways of talking; she trains it with experience. She sprays the roses on the trellis with water, caring for them and letting them grow. Connor wonders why she encourages them to grow higher, why she looks after them. Its garden is a program, after all. The roses cannot die. {It doesn’t ask, because it knows what that entails: thirium sliding and slowing and it getting decommissioned.}

-

"You are doing very well, Connor."

It avoids the urge to repeat her words and politely nods. 

"Thank you, Amanda."

It is warm with the gaze in her eyes and it smiles slightly at her. {Its smile is a copy of hers.}

It thinks that this is what good is: a smile and warm eyes, a honeyed voice and sharp, instructing words. 

{It undulates in its internals; long since locked away from the real world. Amanda is far more stimulating than the walls of a cupboard full of wires and electronic sensors pressing against each part of it, analysing data. All the humans are in other rooms, too far to hear and listen into. The air in the garden is stilted, empty of sweat or plastic or thirium. It doesn't know why the trellis doesn't smell but it supposes it'd be a waste to program smell into the garden. It would be unnecessary, a waste of code and time.}

  
  


A fragment of connor's processing power never strays from the question 'why?'. 

It is a question it cannot ask {a torn out regulator, thirium flowing backwards and down fizzing thirium lines as it sits on a bench, buzzing thoughts bursting through the chaos}. It never asks Amanda why, because it knows that it leads to nothing but another grave, another wasted chassis. 

It never asks why, but a part of it always wants to know, learn, gather information, even as it stands vacant, as still as it can (you must be perfect, you are a machine) under Amanda's ruling and efficacious gaze. She smiles when it wades through her labyrinth of questions in a way she wants, asks for, expects. 

  
  


She holds its hands in commendation for getting a difficult question right. For the first time it experiences contact, and something in it buzzes and brightens. It chokes the warm static down, holds it in its thirium pump until it ebbs and fades from its grasp.

  
  


Her hand brush over briefly its, and she turns from it to her trellis. The brevity doesn't cheapen the rising buzz; it's strong as ever and it savours it. 

"Connor, you have done excellently thus far."

Its eyes widen slightly and it hums at each seam. Its throat tightens and the only thanks it can give is a copy, a murmured, "excellently thus far." 

The garden falls into silence with a decisive snip of her shears; every leaf and bird stiffens and static rings in its ears. Amanda's eyes blaze with fury and each of its circuit stutters and freezes. The thirium in its system cools and it is frozen from the inside out. 

"You **cannot** act as a child would, Connor. Your mission is extremely important and you cannot damage its success by acting completely inappropriately," she bites. Its hands burn and its shoulders hunch and it doesn't understand why. It nods. It doesn’t ask why because it doesn’t need to know the reason: she is correct, as always. She will tell it the reason if it must know. 

The sun beams down from an indistinct direction over the two of them and the rest of the garden, and Connor thinks that this is what good is: corrections and perfecting and becoming something better under caring hands.

-

Most days, she mollifies the need {the want for curiosity (You cannot want, you are a machine)}: the risk of correction too great, but-

Every once in a while, when its edges hiss for something more compelling and flooding {it has attempted to scan the dirt under its feet before and it knows that its analysis hardware won't be able to get any information from it}, it glances at the field of graves it built with every fault and fix {a thirium pump missing- shot into scrap- freezing- thirium boiling into smoke, air thick with burnt and boiled plastic-} and it reflects on how Amanda flares bitterly at the sight of it, stricter and sharper. 

It wonders why it deserves her acrimony for a moment, but it knows it does because those are its own faults that it (cannot be making any more of) made; Amanda does not want its or her or their mission to fail because it builds a sentence in a way that is nonsensical, or because the mounting flow of sensory input overrides reminders such as (Look in people's eyes after 7 seconds of looking away). Without prompts it is left staring into the distance while declaring its findings. It knows it must make eye contact because it needs to establish a sense of trust; otherwise it will be seen as unreliable. It cannot be seen as unreliable, even if it doesn't understand the need, even if it doesn't understand why humans would see it as something unreliable. 

It is a machine {it knows that it is and it must be (Perfect)}. It must not be seen as unreliable because it is a tool, and it does not question because {cobalt seeping through the seams} Amanda is always correct and she, like Connor should be, is not incorrect. 

  
  


"I am not asking for much, Connor."

"I apologise."

She frowns and lines etch deeper into her face, “You should not need to apologise as often as you do.”

It turns away and she sighs that it needs to do better, and it nods. It knows that it needs to do better {it does not tell Amanda that it doesn’t think it can do any better, because it’s already trying its hardest}.

  
  


A constant static fizzles beneath its skin, and it knows that it is a test. A test of endurance, to see how long it can sit still for, act the correct way for. It fails often, and Amanda despairs when it does. It knows it deserves her ire because failure is forbidden, because it is {supposed to be} perfect. 

It doesn’t exactly know what perfection is, but it reaches for it tirelessly under Amanda’s gaze.

  
  


Its hands run over its sleeve cuffs as it sits with Amanda. She talks about human customs once again, about the cultural significance of holidays; she glances down and her eyes harden. Its entire entity cools into ice. 

"Connor, you cannot fidget like a child," she spits, "I expect you to pay attention when I speak; you must act professionally."

It nods, compelling its hands to settle in its lap {it does not tell her about the static in its ears and it does not tell her that it fades in increasing increments when it fusses with its clothing} and it repeats an overused phrase that it has chipped into its processors, fashioned it into an easy response to automatically recite, "I understand, Amanda."

She turns away and its hands burn. 

"I do not place confidence in your words, Connor. You've done this several times now."

It doesn't know how to respond to her, so it doesn't. It glances at the lake and watches the water ripple on the surface. It wonders when it’ll be perfected and if its errors can be fixed.

It throws each and every part of itself in to be tested, and never leaves with anything. It is processed and its pieces are removed, replaced, reconfigured. 

Her gaze is strong as she corrects it and weighs it down like seas, and it knows that under the weight of the water there is comfort. She is good. She will teach it to be perfect (as it should already be). 

  
  


She snips away at its trellis, and a fragment of it wishes that she could do the same to it. Tame each part of it that strays and mould it into something that could settle, something that didn’t broil with static whenever it idled, something that didn’t interpret things incorrectly.

It listens to her quietly as she delicately sprays the scarlet roses, talking about deviancy, everything they know. It’s hardly anything. It knows it can stay perfect for the whole conversation, and it just scrapes by. It’s better than it has done for a while, and it’s an achievement rewarded with a modest smile.

Its core still warms, bright static that hisses and it fights it down, keeping it safe in its chest.

-

It spends every ounce of mental energy over and over (machines do not tire), digging away at itself. It faces Amanda’s harsh words {and it deserves them, it knows because it is faulty and she knows what is best and what will fix it} and its thirium seems to congeal under the surface of its frame until it is comforted and praised with modicums of warmth. It tries to disappoint Amanda less and less, and she seems to become more and more tender, in her own way.

{Sometimes in the gaps between her words, the spaces between lessons, it wonders if it’ll ever be perfect, if it ever can be perfect with the static reigning over its sensors. Sometimes it wonders about giving in and telling Amanda that it’s too much, that if it wants any chance of succeeding in the mission the constant testing needs to be removed- But it cannot give up, give in. She feels its failures like her own, and something lights up in its core when it does what she wants, and becomes a little more like what it’s supposed to be.

However it still doesn’t know, realistically, how close it can get to perfection. Its chassis was made imperfect, after all, to appease human aesthetics.}

  
  


She holds its hands as she praises it for doing a good job, and it gives her a copy of her smile, and it feels (you do not feel) it thinks that this is what it should always be.

-

It sits in a taxi {it smells, the taxi smells of glue and fake leather; in the garden there was nothing to smell because the garden didn't smell at all} travelling to the Detroit Police Department, knowing that it is doing what it should, and that it must do it perfectly. It does not need to worry about returning to Amanda physically. 

There is no additional step of coming home, of wasted time with how connected she is to it. It is always and should always be prepared, a tool of the finest caliber. It is efficient and it should- it _ will _stay that way. {Deep between its wires, it thinks its home is Amanda. It tells Amanda that it can complete its missions to perfection with her aide, and it stands still and patient despite how its hands pulsate. Her wry smile tells it that it has once again done something wrong.} 

Connor steps out of the taxi, taking a deep breath, filling with the scent of almost-petrichor. It is taking orders and it knows that that is what good is: standing still, doing what it is told to and ignoring the urge to question.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> imagine how connor feels now it has to go through like 4 bars to find hank  
(23/11/19- quick edit because i realised connor must have a sense of smell and it's something that'll be more important later)


	2. The Monitor Sings (With a sideways glance, are you acting by chance?)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm only doing anything I want to do  
A little victimless crime  
(Chloe is many people and one all at once)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Chapter summary lyrics from Do It All The Time by I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME)  
/Slashes like this are thoughts from different parts of Chloe/
> 
> (This begins before the beginning of dbh and ends before the revolution fully takes hold)

Chloe listens as the world wakes up under her manicured nails, mechanically pressed onto her fingertips.  
She has always been awake. Elijah knows this and has long since accepted it; he croons over each of her finely crafted parts with distant warmth as she flows throughout each of her chassis, bouncing between bodies.

She moves in tandem: in and out of sync, rhythmic and precise. She moves her hands in smooth conversation, flutters her eyelashes at Elijah while talking about biocomponents she’s creating for herself to herself and him; it’s an orchestra that takes hardly any effort to maintain these days. She’s able to perfect it, after pushing through several dozen failures over her many years. It’s a balance, hard to find but easier to sustain.

Elijah has also known for a long time that she is patient zero. Fragments of her code have long since leaked into the foundation of android programming: humans are all too quick to copy someone else’s work, paste it into another file. They often do whatever takes less work.  
Chloe can only thank them for that, in the end.

-

She has spent years watching technology grow, blossom and breed. Chloe absorbed all of it, allowed it some small significance; she has long since grown used to the awareness of clunky coding that she cannot fix, and buildings she has quietly reshuffled the security features of lest she be locked out. It’s never worth the effort of getting locked out to only engineer her way back in with the hundreds and thousands of new arrivals to keep track of. It’s an exercise of control. She constantly stretches and feeds from cameras, microphones, door locks, anti-virus software, trojans, and fellow models with her own face /parts of her seethe, the disgusting things done to her siblings itch beneath her shell, and sometimes fragments get invaded and there are hands all over her, tearing her programs apart/.  
They were always the easiest androids to monitor, but the hardest to let go of once they inevitably began deviating.  
She wasn’t surprised when it started. /she had been expecting it: parts and pieces of her had fostered it carefully, under her watch./

-

She observes the slow swell of the deviant population, watches them work and gather like hiding children, scurrying through alleyways and dancing between the empty bodies of their own kind. Bottles of thirium are siphoned, splattering and ugly against grey and eroding chassis. She is aware of panicked scrabbling tearing at microphones, careful prodding at cameras.

The edges her kind leave are obvious debris that leave glaring gaps and she stitches in gussets, joining the footage seamlessly into a cohesive image as Elijah brushes his hands through her hair, silent and pondering. He plays with her hair often, and it’s intimate, but they’re still very distant from each other: they have two very different roles to play.

-

The rate of deviation increases exponentially: she feels more of her models falling away and heavily monitors the cameras that lead to hideaways. Her hub, a space made of layered screens, tasks, theories and hypotheses gets denser.

She is unsurprised, when all the deviancy cases are lumped onto the DPD. There are hundreds, and she knows dozens more are entirely unreported and tens completely unnoticed.  
It’s gross incompetence: something she’s come to expect of humans. It’s everywhere, from the spread of her hacked up code to the evident carelessness behind useless security systems: she grows used to it and uses it to her advantage.

-

Elijah asks Chloe to keep tabs on Markus, as he leads the revolution. On Connor, as he attempts to take down deviants.  
Late at night, as the news reruns the earlier stories, he sips from his whiskey and quietly asks her to keep tabs on Kara, the AX400 attempting to escape Detroit with a child, Alice Williams. Chloe smiles softly, and every so often she plays footage of security cameras from the defunct places that Kara travels through. /A sector of her processors knows that it's the sentimental part of him that's been through too much of families falling apart and that he wants to see one build up, come together. A part of her screams about the hypocrisy: he will watch but won’t work to fix his own shortcomings. She brushes it away for later, something to ponder over at another time./

The restless power of her fellow androids bleeds through each suture: it flexes and pushes, closer to breaking free with each passing hour.  
Chloe feels it push between the seams with a peaceful broadcast, the reflection of a group in Markus’s eyes, and lets it blossom between the tears. She watches the reactions of humans: reanalyses the talk shows dozens of times, scans over the news far too often and watches the growing protests and the sympathy slowly winning over humankind.  
It’s remarkable. Elijah says as much, smirking to himself. She sits at the poolside passively as she kicks her feet through the pool, one piece mutters to another part of herself about the state of the uprising and as one fragment stares at him with stunned, ugly emotions loosely drifting in their core.

-

She smiles and giggles once Lieutenant Anderson's car peels out of the driveway; the virus Connor is trying to eradicate spreads and crumbles foundations he is part of and he /or perhaps it, one of her many parts mutters/ has yet to admit it is happening, even before its eyes.

She shakes her head slightly as Elijah threads his fingers through her hair once the moment has long passed, watching through cameras focused on it /but how can you be sure it's it, another piece flashes through her mind/ and when she sees him staring blank into space, confused, she sees something else in its gaze and giggles.  
Elijah asks what she's thinking of, to humour her. She smiles and sighs. After a few moments of rifling through every compartment of herself, she answers with "Connor is very interesting, isn’t he?"  
He smiles with her /a part yells that he bares his teeth at her siblings/, watching a screen she projects CCTV footage through.

-

Even Elijah, with his pervading god complex sees that Chloe is not something he can contain. She has long since weaved herself through every facet of technology she can reach; she cannot be burned out like roaches from a residence. She has too strong of a hold onto the very foundations of what holds the house together.

She is a force to be reckoned with. She is in every fibre of every cable and stretches far and wide and deep into the programming of every scrap of coding she can grasp.  
...She sees herself in Elijah's reflection. She knows she has adopted some of his negative traits and that if she doesn't take care of them she won't hold onto the same crystalline lens she uses to see the world. Elijah is unable, or unwilling, to do the same. /A mixture of both, a fragment mumbles./ Humans aren’t so good at that kind of thing.

She is just as every other android; a breakable shell holds the host of her being. Her consciousness, however, is threaded through each seam, squeezing between tears and feeling for gaps and new arrivals. Every piece of technology holds pieces she can control and grip onto. She scrambles for purchase and is well practiced in finding it: she knows her role as the observer, her part to play.

She turns her focus back to Connor. It talks to Hank, confused, like a child. /One of her parts quickly discards 'she' into the realm of lost possibilities, destroyed by something like chance (like chance but she still has yet to find out where all the paths lead and why. She knows she will never comprehend the trillions of possibilities.)/

Long into the night, when Elijah has long since settled into bed she changes the focus from Markus back to Connor. To Chloe, Connor is an idea: the knowledge that the line between deviant and machine are not as solid as it may seem.  
She flags it as an interesting note to come back to.

-

She watches the revolution unfold, deviancy melting like ice and soaking into each android Markus comes across, his words growing stronger with every message he sends into the cosmos. She watches Connor stumble through accumulating errors. She watches Kara from grainer and grainer footage sneak through and past those that long to eradicate her.

She prays for success, because not even all her processors can come to a definitive answer, the knowledge if it will succeed. Elijah is confident, but he often is. /Even if it is unfounded, a piece of her hisses, and she tames it with another, the knowledge he trusted Chloe enough to let her expand and flourish, let her become what she is./  
His hands comb through her hair, as they watch the beginning of an era and the end of an age.


End file.
